staying vs walking away

Recently I read the story titled "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K LeGuin. This story portrayed how one society's happiness are based one a child's suffering, depression, and hopelessness. If the child is set free, then all of the happiness of Omelas will be gone. Some citizens of Omelas overcame this paradox and chose to remain in the town. Others who did not overcome this injustice, chose to abandon their homes and happiness in order to "walk away" from the situation and avoid feeling shameful.

I bet there is a "suffering child" in all of us, whether you realizes it or not. There was a time when I "stayed" despite the existence of one suffering child-the garbage man. Every Thursday, a garbage man will swept the trashcans in front of my house. He takes away trash and other recyclables and put each bag laboriously on his old and dusty car. You can obviously tell that he certainly did not enjoy his job. I don't think he is even getting paid by the community for his job. All his earnings was from the cans and recyclables. At first, I was shocked by his appearance in front of our house. After fighting the paradox of justice, me and my family chose to keep quiet and did not tell the community about his existence. After some months, His sight became so common that I sometimes even forgot he is there. This is a time when I chose to "stay" instead of "Walking away".

However, there was certainly a time when I had to "walk away" from a paradox. In this case, the suffering child was a little boy. One day, I was walking around our neighborhood at night with three of my older friends. This nameless boy, around 12, bumped into one of my hotheaded friend. The minute the boy bumped into him, I knew trouble was coming. Based on the the temper and size of my friends, I knew I couldn't persuade them on calming down and certainly did not want to participate in the beating. I immediately turned, made up an excuse of "need to finish homework", and hurried back to my house. I was a coward because i didn't think I could do anything to change the situation. Thus, I walked away from the situation. The next day, one of them told me that they, just as I expected, punched the boy last night. I stopped being friends with those three hotheads afterwards and avoided them the best I could.